As the year ends, join me, and let’s revisit some of the best, most read, and most liked of

My 2 cents on design blog posts of 2021!

I have to say I’m very proud of myself. It is not an easy feat to keep a weekly blog. It is hard work and frankly, without a passion for writing you will not succeed. Many thanks to Jessica that has taken on the hard task of helping with the uploads and without which there would’ve been way fewer posts for you to read!

Most importantly, thank you: to all my diligent readers and to my fellow bloggers for listening to what I have to say, for increasing My 2 cents on design audience from few to over 150, for subscribing to the weekly posts and some of you, to the Dochia Trending newsletter. I write for you and hope you find the articles inspiring and useful in your daily life. Remember! You can design it however you want, it’s never too late!

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1. Top 5 tips on how to be emotionally resourceful as a self-employed interior designer

If you’re like me, you know how important it is to have a profession that fills your day with positive emotions, with the joy of great ideas and seeing your clients happy with what you’ve come up with. Like any creative field, most creativity is geared toward making people happy and that reward is great.

Learn to be prepared for when that bad day hits. It will come fast and it can pass as fast. The only thing you need is to stay emotionally resourceful. The rest will happen. READ ARTICLE

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2. Home Pods: how to make one and what to do with it

Aside from Cleaning Day or, more specifically, the day after when everything is perfect and a pleasure to look at, we don’t really spend time looking at our homes as if we are a visitor in a museum or flipping through a design magazine. We just go about the day and do what we normally do.

When I design, this is my starting point. What is it that you do, wherein the home and how? If you pay attention to the habits you have, they will naturally shape the home you will enjoy. The idiosyncrasies of individual lifestyles will make a project a success. READ ARTICLE

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3. The unbearable joy of loving yourself [before you’re almost dead] and designing the life you actually want

When you closely look at how western democracy, for the purpose of the progress of the species, demised human life into demographically usable bits, you realize that modern living is a polarized and systematically caged terrestrial garden of Eden. You can see the garden with its bliss from everywhere you are yet through your choices, luck of the draw, or the self-limitation of your own mind, you may find yourself yearning for its bliss from the distance. READ ARTICLE

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4. I am time

What is time other than us split into millions of pieces doing millions of things?

Busy, screeching painfully at the speed of seconds passing by, bloated seconds, full of the swell of thoughts and chores, ambitions, and fears, too busy to notice each other. Each second sifting through my fingers on its own trying to be noticed and remembered. READ ARTICLE

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5. Best Cooking setup to siZZle up!

Cooking is a pleasant activity only if you have the right tools and if you can minimize the need to clean after you’re done. Which tools those are, vary with the cook but it is safe to assume that non-stick frying pans are on everyone’s list. Add to that wooden spoons and transparent lids and you are halfway there. And most importantly: be true to yourself about the kind of cook you are, nobody will judge you! READ ARTICLE

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6. Intimately Yours, Happy Valentine’s

There is something to be said about loving yourself on Valentine’s Day. About giving yourself a bit of a break, a pause, to remind you that you’re good in your skin and that you like who you are. A day of care and affection does not all need to be about someone else.  Get out of the house and breathe. Nature walks are great for that. Your eye resting on the landscape, your thoughts – your only companion. READ ARTICLE

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7. Design of Creatively Harmonious Intelligent Answers

The act of building is as close to God as one can get. Whichever God one worships is irrelevant. They are all creators. They are all makers. So are architects. So are interior designers. They cloak your soul and extend your body’s bearings by weaving proximities we sense and respond to. We are affected by surroundings more than we know and only now we’re starting to discover this connection and explore and understand how it happens. READ ARTICLE

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8. What is health and what does it have to do with disease

Health is a hot topic in any day and age, especially now. As a species, our primary instinct and goal is survival; and health helps yield high survival rates. But what is health anyway and what does it do for me? How do you build and preserve your health in the presence or absence of disease? The first step is really getting a grasp on what health really means. Call it from an evolved Darwinian position. READ ARTICLE

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9. Why is your home able to boost or kill your mood

By nature, homes are meaningful enough to allow powerful attachment bonds to happen and like anything that you’re bonded to, that bond should be positive and pleasant in order to keep you happy and sane. Beyond the declutter, the cleanliness, the good light and good air that they should always offer, what you want is to find your place in them. To really find your place in them. You want to occupy them in such a way that the small bits of activity that constitute your indoor life are all enhanced by the space where you perform them. READ ARTICLE

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10. The three things that we should not give up any one day of the year

Ever wondered how some people are able to keep a schedule and repeat the same rituals every day? The kind of rituals that are poster-ready, the kind that you would want to have because through some weird and magical connections if you do that, you will achieve some elevated sense of self and accomplishment? We concentrate so much on changing what we have going on that we actually don’t pay attention to what that is. bet if you take a moment to reflect on this, you will find that you do have certain things you yourself do already that stand for your own daily imprint on your own positive sense of self. READ ARTICLE

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Bonus Post!

11. The last days of summer, wrapping up the imposed leisure and what we did with it

We did not have a retrospective in 2020. I’m adding this one here as a reminder of life, and that we should make sure we live it!

Stressed and constantly busy, our lives are emotionally stretched. Modernity managed to bring with it the kind of speed that the industrialists were gearing toward yet never grasped the full consequences of its force. The never-ending to-do lists, the need to work more than enjoy, the exhaustion that this brings that leaves its mark on leisure time diminishing your capacity to enjoy it. Despite the self-isolation and the tremendous pressure, we still experience now as an after-shock, this summer has been for many a blessing in disguise. A unique moment in time where those of us that passed through it healthy, landed in a different reality. We’ve been transported in time to the place where summers were long, breathable, boring, where languishing hours of bird watching and laughter would seemingly never end, where the sun will leave its glowing mark on our skins. READ ARTICLE

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Many years later with many articles pushed into the cloud, 2021 has been by far the most prolific I had. Was it weekly? Almost… by the time the year will end there will be 46 articles. 46 out of 52. Not bad I say! Next year will have 53 Saturdays, 53 Saturdays that I hope I will make better for you with my words and imagination. Getting to fill them all with stories is something to look forward to!